


rewind

by maiaronan



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Complete, F/M, Oneshot, Some Fluff, but it's mostly angst, cw: miscarriage, divine pulse fixes everything, minor mention of sexual content, this is me coping with finishing my golden deer playthrough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:35:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25350259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maiaronan/pseuds/maiaronan
Summary: She thinks about them everyday. She thinks about their faces, and precious smiles, and bleeding hearts and an unrelenting desire to forgive and heal and love each other until death took them away into the scarred earth. She thinks of their kind words and their faith in her, not just as their teacher and commander, but as their friend. Every single day, for the past one thousand years, she thinks of them.But she does not allow herself to think about him.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	rewind

Seteth tells her not to do it.

Seteth likes to tell her a lot of things, and Byleth supposes he has some authority on matters pertaining to living, considering how he’s done all of this before, and has done all of it again before that, and will continue to do it until the sun burns out and the stars fade from existence.

But as supposedly wise as Seteth is, he fails to account for the part of Byleth’s existence that is intrinsically human. The part of her that somehow survives every cold, calculated move on Rhea’s part to cut it out of her.

It’s funny, Byleth muses, how one could live to see the end of time, yet remain so deeply flawed until the very end.

Sothis would have a fit. And sometimes Byleth thinks she can feel her resisting, turning the strings of her heart just enough to make her catch her breath and think of her.

It’s too bad Byleth has made a profession out of going against Sothis’s best intentions.

“ _You are a fool,” she says, and that is how Byleth knows she is loved._

Which is what Seteth tells her, when he catches her in the middle of it. “A fool,” he repeats, “and a shame for you to abuse the Goddess’s gift like this.”

Gift, Byleth thinks, is not the word she would use to describe whatever affliction she’s been left with. And for what is the purpose of a gift if it’s never used?

Seteth scowls at her when she poses the question, but his voice is softer when he responds to it. “Those who try reliving the past are doomed to fail at arriving in the future.” His eyes flicker past her. She knows what he’s looking at. Behind her, in the parlor of their humble brick house, hangs a faded portrait of Rhea. Why it still hangs after all these centuries, Byleth does not know, but it appears that nobody has taken the initiative to take it down.

Perhaps, at the core of it, they can’t.

Byleth does not blame them.

Flayn appears at the end of their house’s walkway, closing the metal gate with a clang. Dressed in white, swinging a basket of fruit and pastries she’s collected at the local market, she makes her way up the winding path, humming cheerfully. She stops short as she sees Byleth and Seteth posed tensely by the front door.

“Fancy seeing you two homebodies out at the same time,” Flayn teases, but her airy demeanor quickly fades out of her expression as the gravity of the situation settles onto her shoulders. She ducks her head, and slips past them.

Seteth gives Byleth one last stony look of disapproval before disappearing into the house after his daughter.

Byleth sighs as she sinks onto the steps of the porch. The hard cobblestone rubs against her thighs as she sits on the stairs.

The sun inches away under the horizon, casting a dusky orange glow into the sky.

How many of these sunsets has she seen, but can only recall the times she’s seen it from the precarious almost-drop of a stone bridge? How many times has the same orange sky appeared before her in the last millennium, but the only sunset she remembers is the one with the people who are not with her anymore?

_She finds Ignatz and Marianne at the foot of the Goddess Tower. From her distance, she sees Ignatz pointing to the sky. And slowly, she sees Marianne lift her head from her shoes and let the coral rays of sundown bathe her pale, pinched face. From her position on the bridge, Byleth feels the warmth of the sun and the heat of a blush that doesn’t belong to her, but settles nicely on her skin, nonetheless._

_The overfed sparrows of the monastery flitter by. Marianne leans against the bridge’s railings. Ignatz takes out his sketchbook. Byleth watches them until it’s too dark to see anything but the moon and fireflies._

She thinks about them everyday. From the golden rays of sunrise, to when the golden sun ascends into the sky and falls again, to when the golden twilight filters through the glass panes of her window as she drifts off into her memories.

She thinks about them now, as night rolls in on a cool wind, caressing her cheek like a lover’s touch.

_Lysithea’s handle on her arm is like a vice grip. Byleth feels her skin bruising and wonders if it’s normal for children her age to still be terrified of ghosts like this, but then again, when have her students ever been of the normal sort?_

_Byleth whispers to her that hey, if she thinks about it logically, nothing stops ghosts from coming out in the daylight too, and it’s all just an illusion. This makes Lysithea scream and grip her harder. So much for logic, which Byleth quickly learns doesn’t exist when it comes to fear. So Byleth casts the brightest spell she knows at the time, lighting up the monastery’s courtyard with a blinding glow, and leads Lysithea step by step across the familiar pathways._

_“Hey, turn that off! Some of us are trying to_ sleep _here!” comes Cyril’s angry shout from two stories above her. Lysithea laughs, breathless, terrified, but she’s laughing. She’s laughing._

Byleth sits and watches the light fade. She hears Seteth and Flayn through the open windows. They’re making dinner together, something they’ve gotten progressively better at over the years. Flayn’s method involved throwing everything together and hoping it comes out alright, which Byleth much preferred to Seteth’s bland and under-seasoned meals. She knows Flayn won out today from a gale of fragrant, perfumed spices that wafts out the house and into her senses.

_“I’m actually a good cook, which people don’t really know about me,” Raphael tells her. His face is red and shiny from the heat of the grill in front of them. She never expected it, but here he is, saving their entire house from shame at the academy-wide breakfast. “I had to be, y’know? With my parents being gone and all, someone had to feed us. Me and my little sis. Yeah, I had to learn how to do everything real fast. Say, Professor, your eggs are looking rather uh... crispy there. Are you sure you don’t need some help? Oh yeah let’s get that pan out of there—OUT OF OUR WAY FLAMING EGGS COMING THROUGH!”_

Byleth closes her eyes, and smiles to herself.

The front door creaks open. Slowly. Tentatively. “Professor,” Flayn greets from behind her, and Byleth looks up. Who, her? Something inside of her thrums. Something that hasn’t ached in a long time.

_“Well, I call you that, but I am afraid that I am not a student here myself...”_

Flayn has left Seteth behind in their house, and comes to sit next to her on their porch.

Their house. Their porch.

There had been a time when Byleth would’ve never been in close quarters with Seteth and Flayn, no matter how much she cared for them. Seteth would’ve driven her mad, Flayn would’ve driven her mad, and worst of all, that would mean... that would mean she was one of them.

That would mean she’s one step closer to being what Rhea wanted her to be.

Or maybe she’s one step closer to _being_ Rhea.

But that was a time when she had the capacity to think about these things. To deny her inevitable outcome. To pause on her destiny for just. A little longer.

Byleth shares the house, a once-spacious abode that’s been dwarfed by the surrounding villas and mansions over the years, now an unsightly brick landmark of a time long past. She does it because she has little choice. She either sleeps in the room between Seteth and Flayn, or she sleeps alone in a different, empty house, in a city she no longer recognizes.

At the end of the day, she is human. And she chooses to not be alone.

“Professor,” Flayn says again. Her green eyes peer at her, kindly, with a gaze that Byleth is sure to reflect her own.

Byleth shifts, and the pressure that’s been building up in her throat escapes as she looks away from her companion. For one brief second, the world disappears, and she sees those awful cracks above her rickety dorm bed, hardly fit for a student and much less a professor, but with every tick of the clock next to her and drip of the water inside the wall, she accepts that she is.

 _A professor._ Their _professor. Whatever that will mean to them._

“It’s Byleth now,” she says slowly, returning to the reality at hand. “I’m not much of a professor without students to teach, don’t you think?” She returns her attention Flayn. The girl is older now, if only slightly. Her features round out what looks like her early twenties with a maturing updo and a better fashion sense.

 _“We have to do something about this,” is the only line of Hilda’s incredibly unhelpful speech, and when Byleth throws her a confused look, Hilda rolls her eyes and gestures at Flayn. As if whatever she is pointing out is obvious. “Who is dressing her? Seteth? Rhea?” A gasp. “_ You _, Professor? Do you have eyes? The atrocities you’ve committed!” And when Byleth attempts to clear her name, Hilda giggles into the back of her gloved hand, an incredibly lady-like gesture for the only student who still sleeps through her seminars. “Let’s take her into town this weekend to go shopping. You’ll sneak her out so Seteth won’t see and skin us alive, right?”_

Even with all these changes, Byleth will never truly discard that youthful, child-like version of Flayn she came to know all those centuries ago.

She never admits any of this, though, because that would encourage Seteth’s bad, overprotective habits. And Flayn tolerates it in her patient, understanding way.

And that is how they live. If that’s the word.

Flayn gives her a sympathetic smile. She’s rolling the stem of a flower she’d picked up from the market between her fingers. It’s white with a bright red center, like blood on a canvas of clean snow.

 _“Floral arrangement is an art,” Lorenz admonishes her as Byleth jabs another rose into the vase. “The flowers themselves, the positioning, the vessel, the messaging... each choice deliberate and beautiful, much like dancing at a_ ball _?” Lorenz gestures at the empty ballroom. Students and staff scattered everywhere, an assortment of helping hands hanging lights, folding napkins, fluffing tablecloths, mopping the marble floors until they shone. Byleth must’ve rolled her eyes at him, for Lorenz scoffs at her in his aggressively Lorenz way. “When you understand how important this is, you’ll come running back to me when you need a bouquet for an occasion,” he warns her. “Or even worse, a_ man _.”_

_Byleth snorts so hard at this proposition that she pricks herself with the rose thorn._

_“Professor!” Lorenz admonishes, whipping out his bright white handkerchief and immediately receiving her bleeding digit in its silken embrace. The red pools onto the unsoiled linen, and Byleth marvels at the warmth of Lorenz’s delicate hands._

“You could always teach at the day school,” Flayn suggests. “I hear they’re looking for new teachers.”

The day school. It’s all that’s left of Garreg Mach. It’s not an unfitting name, Byleth thinks, considering how the last war razed the grand, stone monastery to the ground. A small school and several houses were built over its ruins afterwards, and Garreg Mach was left largely forgotten. Thank the Goddess that Ignatz had painted her several canvases of the building in his day.

Yes, thank the Goddess.

Byleth feels the edges of her lips crack into the beginnings of a cynical smile, but she forces herself to stop. It never feels right to perform anything sardonic in front of Flayn. A bad habit she picked up from her monastery days, that’s for sure. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about things like... arithmetic and poetry.” The first crickets begin to rise from their grassy roots in song. “There isn’t much employment for a swordfighter these days.”

 _“How did Jeralt even produce sword wielder?” Leonie demands of her as Byleth is, inconveniently, trying to save herself from being kicked in the face by her unruly equine companion. The stables are unbearably hot during the Verdant Rain Moon. “Didn’t he teach you how to use a lance and ride a horse? Oh gods, I can’t even imagine_ not _learning how to ride from the Blade Breaker himself. What an opportunity to pass up.”_

_Byleth feels that this is an adequate time to inform her that even though she did know how to ride, she doesn’t particularly like horses, which shocks Leonie into a rare moment of speechlessness. Byleth, uncomfortable at her scrutiny, asks if she has a favorite horse at the stable to try to steer the subject away._

_Leonie doesn’t respond, but this time there’s no shock, or outrage, or jealousy. Just a familiar wave of bitter regret that rolls off the young woman far too often. When Byleth lays an awkward but gentle hand on her shoulder, miffed at what she could’ve said to turn the switch off in her vocabulary, Leonie whispers to her, “I actually don’t know how to ride yet.” She’s embarrassed. Her face is as red as her hair. “There were no horses at my village. But I came here to learn. And I will. I will! Don’t you doubt me, Professor. I’ll become the best knight you’ll ever see.”_

_And so she did._

“The great thing about... all this,” Flayn begins, shivering slightly as the night winds continue to blow, “is that you can always learn something new.”

Byleth blinks at her.

“Be something new.” Flayn’s voice is nothing more than a whisper now.

Byleth lets the faintest smile touch her lips. “Can you, now?” she returns, hearing the wind carry away her voice. “Have you become someone new, Flayn?”

Flayn pauses, her gaze searching. “I’ve become... more me, I think.” She fiddles with the flower in her hand. “I don’t live in fear of my own blood anymore. I can call Seteth who he really is, my father. And... and I think one of these days, I’m going to meet someone. You know, someone... to love.”

The two women stare into the distant horizon. The first stars begin to peer into the indigo expanse above them.

_“I didn’t believe in gods when I was a kid.”_

No.

Byleth snaps her mind shut, like a heavy book threatening to leak all of her secrets from its pages.

She thinks about them everyday. She thinks about their faces, and precious smiles, and bleeding hearts and an unrelenting desire to forgive and heal and love each other until death took them away into the scarred earth. She thinks of their kind words and their faith in her, not just as their teacher and commander, but as their friend. Every single day, for the past one thousand years, she thinks of them.

But she does not allow herself to think about him.

Not him. Not ever him.

She couldn’t. She _can’t_.

She—

_“Maybe that’s because the night sky took their place for me.”_

She feels the pulse that should not exist hammer at her skin. She hears herself take a breath, and another one, and a—

“Oh, Byleth,” Flayn gasps, and Byleth sees her ghostly hand reach out to wipe her cheek. It’s wet. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Byleth shakes her head, feeling the familiar, dreaded pain stabbing at the back of her throat. “No worries,” she whispers, aware of the tears spilling out of her eyes but making no move to amend them. “This just happens sometimes now.”

She never used to cry. What a sentimental being she’s become.

Flayn hands her a handkerchief from her pocket. White, with a red embroidered border. If Byleth’s vision wasn’t blurred by her sudden attack of tears, she’d comment on how much it looked like something Sylvain would slip into their pockets back at the monastery days.

Flayn studies her, a deep sadness creeping across her porcelain face. “I...” She hesitates. “I’ve lived a long time, but I know I haven’t experienced very much. So I always try to be... oh, what’s the word? Empathetic. I learned it the other day at the school. It means... to try to feel what others are feelings as if those feelings are your own.” Byleth feels her cool hand touch hers. “That is why... I wish to fall in love one day. Because while I understand your pain, the pain of losing your mother, your friends... I know I can’t possibly understand how you and Father feel. About... about...” Her voice trails off.

“Thank you, Flayn,” Byleth murmurs, squeezing her hand reassuringly. “You are doing great, just as you are.”

The wind howls. Flayn glances down at her hands again. Her flower has been gently set aside. “Can I ask... what does it feel like?”

Byleth inhales. Once. Sharply. “Like you will never see the sun again.”

Flayn’s eyes glimmers with tears as Byleth’s words cut through the night air like a knife. “Oh,” she sniffles. “I... I see. How horrible. I’m so sorry I asked. Byleth...” She sobs. “You must really miss him.”

In a gesture that is frighteningly more familiar than it should be, Byleth smiles. What choice does she have? “Shall we get you to bed?” she asks softly, moving her hands up Flayn’s arms in a slow, soothing stroke. That little girl she met at the monastery all those years ago is still there, and she still needs her teacher’s guidance.

Flayn nods, hiccuping as she gathers her sensibilities and helps Byleth to her feet. Standing is strange, after sitting for so long. She feels lightheaded as she and Flayn open the front door to their house and usher themselves inside, arm in arm.

Flayn’s room is the first one in their corridor, just off the the top of the creaking, wooden stairs. Her room is simple as is her bed, the modesty of living a habit that’s carried over from her monastery days. As she settles into her blankets with Byleth at her side, she presses a kiss to Byleth’s hand. It’s a rare gesture of affection that Byleth doesn’t experience much these days, and the fog of her pain clears for a heartbeat.

“I thought I’d tell you this before Seteth finds out,” Flayn whispers, gazing up at Byleth’s glimmering stare. “But I think I _have_ found the one.”

Byleth blinks. She hadn’t expected that. “Oh?” she whispers back, unable to hold back the joy in her voice. “Who are they?”

“The schoolteacher,” Flayn giggles.

“Oh, Flayn,” Byleth admonishes, flicking her former student’s nose. “That’s just trouble waiting for you. Take it from me.”

“That’s okay,” Flayn murmurs, clasping Byleth’s hand tighter. “Sometimes trouble is worth the rest that comes with it.

Byleth swallows, smiling, nodding, and feeling a fresh wave of emotion filling the empty cavity in her chest. “Did I teach you that one?” she teases, but her voice is heavy.

“Professor,” Flayn says again, and the familiarity of the word threatens to stop Byleth’s non-existent heart. Her tone is suddenly quiet. Serious. “If you need to do it, I understand. Maybe not in the way you need me to, but I understand.”

Byleth smiles at her, feeling her emotions pouring into her eyes and hands and fingertips once more. “Thank you, Flayn,” she murmurs. “I think you understand more than you give yourself credit for.”

Flayn returns her pained smile, before closing her eyes and leaning back against her pillow. Byleth tucks the remaining blankets around her, in just the way she likes, and leaves her room with a soft click of her door.

Seteth is waiting for her in the hallway. Byleth expected this, but it didn’t make his appearance less unnerving. She senses his judgment, his concern—stone cold and desperate all the same, and she lets it pass through her, as if they were made of nothing but air.

“She gets it from you, you know.”

Seteth has never been the type to be cryptic, or maybe Byleth is just tired and more emotionally drained than she can account for. “What do you mean?” she asks, her attachment to their current reality growing fuzzier as her energy passes through the heaviness of her eyelids. She must’ve alarmed Seteth with the stiffled yawn that follows, for Byleth is rarely physically sleepy these days, and these people—these Nabateans—jump a foot into the air when one of them yawns. The sound is almost painful for them to bear.

Seteth looks like he has a soliloquy prepared, but at the state of Byleth’s tear-stained face and exceptionally dull expression, he spares her. “Just think about it, Byleth,” is all he says, in a manner that reminds Byleth so much of her real father, but at the same time, is so distant from Jeralt’s gruff, detached ways. Seteth turns to head into his own room for the night. “Really... think about it.”

Byleth closes her eyes and nods.

 _Really_ think about it, he’d said.

Seteth knows. It’s hard to hide things from him these days. It was _always_ hard to hide things from him, but even more so now, when the two of them live so closely and share so much of their lives together.

“ _I may not know you as intimately as he did, but I do know you, Byleth. Give me some credit for putting up with your antics for all these years.”_

If Seteth did have anything resembling a lifespan, Byleth acknowledges that she must’ve taken at least a quarter of it off from the sheer amount of... trouble she’s caused him.

She’s almost sorry.

A smile plays on her lips in the dark, a smile for nobody at all.

As Byleth heads to her own bedroom, she thinks about how long her life has been like this—a dapple of tears and half-smiles.

Flayn recently crossed off the dreaded four digit milestone on their calendar, an endeavor of hers she’s been keeping up for what seems to be a thousand years.

A thousand years.

What Byleth had said was true, the part of her that’s bad at arithmetic—she’d always been abysmal at it, much to Jeralt’s dismay, but in the end it did little to affect her upbringing as a cold-blooded mercenary anyway. Her mind works in a different way, chess pieces, spaces, sweep of numbers and estimates of strengths. Maps, lines, diagrams, charts and jagged entries on paper that she’d used to calculate her battle plans and to win wars, but the tally of numbers never made it to her brain in the end. It never mattered.

The only numbers Byleth keeps onto these days seem arbitrary. Seventy, is one of them. Nine hundred and thirty is the other one.

Byleth strips off her daywear and folds them into a neat pile on her desk chair. She never usually does this—her clothes typically end up in an unsightly pile by the foot of her bed.

Byleth debates putting on her night clothes. Now _those_ were in that pile by her bed, but she hesitates. And then she decides to forgo the clothes, and crawls into her bed bare-skinned.

Her cotton sheets are cool and her blanket heavy. They envelop her in a way that’s almost comforting, a familiar pacifier. Byleth could close her eyes, fall asleep, and convince herself that tomorrow may be different.

But she doesn’t.

She lies awake instead.

_“Change me back.” She has her dagger, silver and deadly, to Rhea’s throat. “Make me mortal again.”_

_Rhea’s exhausted eyes never once look up at her. “I cannot.”_

_“Lies.” She could cut herself on her own blade with how tightly she’s gripping it. Her steady hand shakes. “You’re a liar.”_

_“So I am,” Rhea agrees, voice dissipating into the cloak of darkness. Zanado looks neither red nor brown nor golden nor black in the night. It simply ceases to be._

During the first century of her life, Byleth read every book, brewed every concoction, seen every doctor—witch or otherwise—on the condition of being a goddess. Was there an alchemist out there who could turn her stone heart into flesh? A potion that could turn her green blood back to red?

The wind blows through her window, slightly ajar, sweeping sweet summer air across her face and body. She shivers at its touch, watching her curtains, silver in the moonlight, ripple back and forth.

_“You know you could... stay. If you wanted to.”_

Jeralt never let her grow up selfish. But desperation carves a new person out of ruined stone, every time.

Byleth turns to her side, molding her body to fit with her swath of blankets, and wishes it was the heat of another, instead of cool, lifeless fabric.

She breathes in. _I deserve to feel too._ And then she breathes out, shakily. _I wish I never learned to have a heart._

The words, the feelings, clash at one another, fangs bared and dripping with blood.

 _Make up your mind_ , she thinks angrily, almost expecting a biting response from Sothis at the ferocity of which she screams it into herself. But of course, Sothis remains silent, as she has for the last millennia, and leaves Byleth to wrangle with her own torment.

Salty, stinging tears collect in the corners of her eyes again, and wonders if this is necessary. Why did she need to crack her heart open to feel validated in her decisions?

_Because it’s the only way to know._

Byleth lets out a breath. “Sothis?” she whispers.

The lush lull of crickets is all that answers her.

Byleth sinks into her bed once again, her heart aching and despondent.

_Just think about it, Byleth._

She closes her eyes.

_Really... think about it._

And so tonight, when the moon is a beautiful crescent in the indigo sky and the winds are warm and green with summer, she obeys her heart. And she thinks of him.

She realizes she misses him, his whole being, and she’s almost afraid that she’s tucked him away in the recesses of her mind for so long that she’s lost him. It’s a silly thought, she knows, but the fear of losing the last bits of him that she has, her memories of him, is so real that it stops her from ever pulling them out and having them with her again.

 _Rewind the hands of time_.

It’s easy when she lets herself. The first thing that presses into the back of her eyelids, that quiet and untouched space, are his eyes.

How many days and months and years did she find herself locked in that gaze of his? Memorized each fleck of gold and green, the way they narrowed into contented slits when he sat out in the sun, the way he could barely keep them open during their long nights of work, the way they turned up just slightly as he successfully made her laugh with another horrid joke of his, the way they swam with every complicated emotion that flickered underneath his immovable exterior.

The way they saw her like nobody else could.

Even in his very last moments, his eyes were still fixed upon hers, as she lay next to him and the torrential eastern rains flooded the Almyran palace with a ferocity never before seen by its people. They say the heavens wept when their king passed through its gates.

Rewind.

_“Don’t let them think I went to any sort of heaven,” he tells her as she rolls back the collar of his tunic, exposing the patch of skin under his collarbone. “I’m going straight to hell. Don’t you forget that.”_

_Byleth chuckles as she places her hand over his heart, commencing their nightly ritual—she applies fifteen seconds of whichever new combination of white magic that the healer from Morfis had prescribed to them, and he takes that time to admire her as she tends to him. “Of course not.”_

_“A perfect arrangement, you and I,” he says often, and continues to do so until his golden heart beats its last._

Him and Sothis and Jeralt and all of her precious students and allies and children she’s never seen, washes away with time’s sand.

Rewind.

_“I can do it.” She can hear how hard she’d been crying in the way her voice doesn’t even sound like her voice anymore. It’s heavy, rusted, broken. “Maybe we just haven’t found the right solution. Let’s try again.” She swallows, and a fresh flood of tears chokes her. “Please.”_

_“Byleth,” comes Claude’s voice, so gentle and firm all at once, laying solid ground beneath her feet as she’s tossed repeatedly into her seas of torment. “Byleth, listen to me.”_

_He holds her, presses her up against his broad chest and tangles his fingers into her matted hair. She clings to him like she’s drowning._

_“You almost died, my love.” He’s trying to reason with her. Always with the reasoning. Yet she closes her eyes, sobs, and listens to his voice rumbling under her ear, resonating inside him. “Hanneman and Manuela say you might not be so lucky next time. This will really hurt you if it doesn’t kill you first.” He kisses the crown of her head. “We can’t try again. It’ll never be worth it if I lose you.”_ Again _. But he does not say it aloud._

_Byleth tries to breathe. There’s so much darkness. She’s choking. “I can’t give you the one thing you’ve always wanted,” she whispers, her face soaking the linens of Claude’s shirt._

_Claude chuckles, and tightens his embrace around her. “You’ve already given me everything.” There is no sorrow in his voice, no malice, no regret. She wonders how it is so. “You are the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”_

_She listens to his heart beat, steady and deafening, fascinating as ever._

_Later, after they fall asleep together under the silken covers of the royal chambers, she awakens in the night with a single phrase on her lips. “Khalid. I’m sorry.”_

She is so afraid of his name turning into the mindless howl of the wind that she never lets herself think it, say it, use it to her benefit.

But it’s there, and he has it, and he’s the only one who will answer to it.

“Khalid,” she breathes again into the night, and the cold inside of her flushes with a heat that she hasn’t felt in a long, long time.

Rewind.

_“Is it too early to think about names?” Claude asks as he slings a heavy, warm arm around her. They’re sitting in front of the door to Manuela’s infirmary. He’s jittering, nervous, in a way that Byleth has never seen him before. He’s faced entire armies of enemies in glittering armor and wielding deadly-sharp weapons, and now he’s anxious over a routine visit to Manuela’s office. She almost giggles._

_She places a hand on his restless knee. “I don’t think so,” she says as she leans into his embrace. He’s always so warm. Maybe it’s because she’s always as cold as marble, but there’s something about Claude that makes him just so much warmer to her. “Did you already have some in mind?”_

_Claude grins at her. “You’re going to hate me for this one,” he says._

_“No, we cannot name our child Claudeleth unironically,” Byleth deadpans._

_Claude pauses. “That’s actually a pretty good one.”_

_“Claude.”_

_He laughs. “Sorry. No, I meant to say...” He presses his forehead against hers and lays a hand on her firming stomach. “I’d like to name him Khalid. If you agree to it.” He levels his gaze with her, brushing a strand of hair from the side of her face to tuck it behind her ear. “It was my father’s name, and it was my name.”_ Was _. The ‘was’ hurts her. “So please, my dear, will you do this for me?”_

_Byleth closes her eyes and kisses him. “Of course,” she murmurs after she pulls away._

_Claude hums. “Thank you.” He kisses her back._

_And now they’re kissing in front of Manuela’s infirmary, which has happened many times before, more times than they would care to admit, but this time, with his hand on her stomach and her heart in her throat, it’s different._

She thinks of her blade, trembling with the anticipation of slicing into hot, bloody flesh, pressed up against Rhea’s neck.

Rewind.

“ _You two are going to have the hottest babies,” Hilda sings as she strings the yellow banner across the wall. It looked ridiculous—a bright paper strip across beautiful painted tiles depicting wars of centuries past and bodies of naked men and women frolicking across the mural. But it’s what Hilda wanted, and Hilda always gets what she wants._

 _“What is a..._ baby shower _?” Byleth had asked, genuinely baffled. “How do we shower the baby?”_

_“Oh, Professor, you are hilarious,” Hilda had laughed, and told her not to worry about it._

_In two days time, the main hall of the Almyran palace transformed into an eyesore of streamers and hanging lights and baby-themed decorations of the moon and stars variety. It’s garish and awful in the way only Hilda can make things garish and awful, but Byleth will admit it had some charm. After all, Hilda led the entire celebration’s charge with Marianne and Ignatz reluctantly in tow, with Lorenz bursting into the scene halfway through the decorating session with some serious complaints on the aesthetic._

_“The future heir to the Almyran_ and _Fodlan throne has been announced to the world and_ this _is what we receive him with,” Lorenz gasps, sputtering, dabbing his hairline with an already damp handkerchief. “Hilda, this looks worse than the Establishment Day party you threw during our first year at Garreg Mach. What_ is _that?” Lorenz snatches a paper cutout from a nearby table. “Is this a foot?”_

 _“A_ baby’s _foot,” Hilda insists, snatching it back from him._

_“Ghastly,” Lorenz moans._

_“Oh shut up,” Hilda growls, waving a paintbrush with glittering, golden pigment like a weapon. “You agreed to this! You planned these two lovebirds’ ridiculous wedding, and now I plan the baby showers!”_

_“Did I hear you say showers?” Claude chooses this moment to walk into the hallway, whistling as he casts his eyes upwards at the dozens of colorful lights draping over the chandeliers above. “As in plural?”_

_Hilda throws the paintbrush at Claude. He catches it without so much a blink or a flinch. “We’re taking bets,” she tells him. “I’m thinking you’re going to have four or five based on how much fucking you do.”_

_Across the room, Marianne faints into Ignatz’s arms._

In that moment, Byleth remembers feeling a horrifying kinship with the woman—no, the _monster_ —that throws her back to the Tailtean Plains, almost a millennium ago. _You'll die for that! Die, die! You took...everything... that I loved!_ Who is saying that? Rhea or Byleth or another entity entirely? She cannot tell the past from the past from the present anymore, and lets the rage consume her.

She thinks of the venom that drips from her voice. _You ruined everything._

Rewind.

 _Cyril warns her that Almyran weddings are an_ affair _and not to be underestimated. He made it clear that this one was going to be especially disastrous considering how important it is. It isn’t every day that the King of their nation gets married._

_He leaves her wondering if she should take the thought of her own wedding being disastrous as a compliment or an insult, but soon finds out that Cyril is merely telling the truth._

_Preparations for their wedding begin taking place a year before their planned date. Lorenz had won a questionable bet with Hilda, and Byleth’s own wedding falls in the hands of the_ nobility _of Fodlan._

_At least, the Foldan part of the wedding._

_“You sure we can’t just elope?” Byleth asks Claude one morning. It’s a quiet one during the wintery Ethereal Moon, with snow peppering their windows and icicles hanging off the sills. “Is it, mm, necessary to get married twice?”_

_Claude laughs and buries his face in her shoulder. The sun’s almost at its peak, although it’s hard to tell through the gray skies. They are in no rush to leave their bed of tangled sheets. “I don’t know about you, but I’d marry you as many times as I possibly can,” he says, his words warm and loving on her skin._

_Byleth smiles and runs her hands through his long, dark hair. “Always the romantic.”_

_“It’s the truth,” Claude insists, closing his eyes at her touch. “But if you really want to call all of this off, sign a paper at the parliament, and go to the seaside for a few months, then I’m with you.”_

_Byleth gasps. “Oh, Lorenz would kill us,” she whispers, eyes widening with glee._

_“He can’t,” Claude says, reaching for her hand. “Not if everyone in Almyra would’ve killed us first.”_

_They laugh and snuggle closer._

She still wears his ring. The color of the silver band has faded and the emerald has fallen off more times than she could remember, and with each visit to the goldsmith she recounts his story to a different fascinated jeweler who marvels at how “this kind of ring design has been long lost to time” and “this must be from Almyra before they were annexed” and “how did you get your hands on something like this?”

Byleth smiles patiently and tells them her husband was a curious one, fond of history as if he’s lived through it.

They always return the ring in pristine shape, but Byleth’s heart aches with every repair.

Rewind.

_She turns the ring around her finger. It fits perfectly. Claude must’ve been paying attention to her hands for a while. Because when would he have had time to find a ring in the middle of a war?_

_He must’ve picked it up back when they were still at Garreg Mach._

_She notes this in her letter to him._

_Byleth writes Claude many letters, but he only returns a few. She knows he’s probably busy—busier than he’s ever been—but he’ll never admit it._

_“I’ll be back before you know it.”_

_She’s never been the type to notice the passage of time, but the six months that’ve passed since he’d gone off to “cross Fodlan’s throat”, so he said, have been nothing short of torturous._

_She also wants to note this in her next letter to him, but she also thinks about how he waited five years for her._ Five years _. This is nothing._

_So she writes him her update of Fodlan, about how Lysithea and Lorenz had somehow gotten married after he’d left for Almyra, but are waiting for him to return so they can throw, in Lorenz’s words, a proper event. She informs him of Hilda’s antics of renovating Raphael’s inn into an accessory shop, which refuses to have its grand opening without Claude, and how Ignatz has disappeared from Fodlan with a heavy purse of coins, granted to him by the Edmund estate._

_So in short, all is going well._

_But it would be better with him in the picture, of course._

_But she will wait._

_It would only be fair._

As she keeps paging back the starts and ends of her memories, they start to get blurrier, faster, less cohesive—she’s seeing flashes of things she’s forgotten she knows—

_— they’ll only be apart for a short while, and Byleth hating how much she understands, and her body and mind and heart fight a long war with each other over whether she should nod or cry or wish him the best or beg for him to stay—_

_—she finally realizes how tiny her hand is in his, gloved and black velvet and_ noble _in the way he would’ve hated five years prior, but he’s different now,_ she’s _different now—_

— _“One more thing, Teach,” he whispers as he pulls his wyvern to a stop next to her, the shadowy silhouettes of the phantom enemy emerging in the mists ahead of them, and Byleth snaps out of her battle-focused zone she’s forced herself into, and she looks up at him, and realizes the boy she knew five years ago has been replaced by a man, a man hardened by war and tamed by the responsibility of thousands of lives, and she almost misses that carefree Claude raising hell back at the Officers Academy, but before she could fully mourn her loss, he slips off his mount and crosses the distance between them and presses his lips upon her ear and shatters her world, “I haven’t been entirely truthful to you all these years. I don’t think it matters, but my real name is... Khalid. I want you to know that just... just in case,” and Byleth embraces him and laughs at how wrong she is to assume that Claude, full of surprises and secrets, had ever gone away—_

 _—she runs the list through her head, inventory first—spears, swords, bows and arrows—does everyone have enough arrows—concoctions, have the horses been fed, are the battalions armed, has she forgotten anything, she’s forgotten_ something _she knows it, she paces and paces and paces on the dead yellow grass of the Caledonian Plateau, her footsteps producing that sickening crunch as she wears a path into the side of the hill, and she catches Claude looking at her with an expression she’s unable to disentangle from him, so she walks over to him and asks him if he’s ready for whatever hell is about to meet him down in the valley, and he merely looks up at her with so much love in his eyes that she feels her heart fall into a depth she never knew she had—_

 _—the two of them, panting in the darkness as she’s gripped with the terror of how much she loves him, and what she would do if she ever lost him, and wonders if she’s lost her mind for letting him follow her into battle, but realizes as he presses his palm into her backside and lights burst behind her eyelids that he must be thinking the exact same thoughts, and gives up, gives_ in _, completely, to their fate—_

 _—he perches a heavy weaved blanked on his shoulders as she is numb with tears that will not fall, “I killed them Claude, I did, Ashe and Bernie and Caspar and Edelgard, Edie, my precious Edie, my_ students _,” and she wishes she could cry but she’s empty, devoid of the ability to grieve and shocked to the core from the flames of war that tear at the flesh inside her chest, and he leans on her and tells her it’s okay to breathe, and she tries, she really tries, for him—_

_—he waited for her, is all she can think, as she throws herself into his embrace, strange and broad and so not like him but still everything like him, and touches him like he’s a brand of fire— “Claude?” she asks, already in his arms, his gloved hands already gripping at her hair as he breathes her in, murmuring into her neck over and over “you’ve come back to me, you’re back, you’re back, you’re back”—_

— _she’s running to the building of her dreams, its gleaming stone walls now scorched black and crumbling, seared like her jumbled memories, but she knows one thing, it’s been five years, and she promised,_ promised _them, they could all be dead and it would be her fault, and her legs are heavy and laden with sleep but she stumbled, struggles, and urges herself onward, for_ them _—_

_—the last thing she sees is Claude’s terrified face lit up by the raging fire of Rhea’s scream, his mouth in the shape of her name as he calls for her—_

_—“Claude, please,” she finds herself pleading, “it’s me”,_ it’s me, _and she tries to kiss him to remind him of who she is, but the hesitation, the instinctive pull back as she approaches him, it all tears at her, the way his gaze flickers between her green hair and green eyes and the suspicion resting in his expression hurts her in a way no battle wound can—_

— _she always thought revenge was colored red, an angry force of human nature that consumed everything in its path, but she quietly marvels how revenge is, in fact, black, cold and stony, resting like ice in her soul, focused, deadly, like a void of nothingness whispering seduction into her ear to kill, kill, kill—_

_—he brings her a cold plate of food and forces her to shut her father’s diary, and watches her eat to ensure she does something other than mindlessly read the same thirty books on black mages and otherworldly magic she’s checked out from the library, and in this moment she breaks from her spell and sees the gaunt exhaustion on the Riegan boy’s face, and realizes he’s been toiling at finding an answer just as long as she has, and she lets him lead her to her personal chambers, and lets him undress her and put her in her bed, and before he respectfully leaves her to her desperately-needed rest, she catches his wrist and whispers for him to stay, and he does, just to remind her that she’s still alive and here and there are living, breathing bodies that need their teacher back—_

_—he watches her practice with this new, ridiculous sword of hers—it’s basically the size of her entire body, and she’s somehow still able to wield it like a feather—she practices her forms with it in all her free time, making sure a future enemy can’t catch her off guard with this giant thing, and every time she appears on the training grounds she senses his calculating eyes boring a hole into her, desperate to figure her out, and Byleth wishes he would believe her when she says she doesn’t know either, but she’s not the kind to ask questions that she knows will never be answered—_

_—“Teach? Teach... Hi, you were daydreaming again or something,” he says as he zeroes in on her forehead, as if he can see Sothis wreaking havoc up there, and for a split second Byleth panics and almost believes he does, “what’s going on in that head of yours?” he asks, and Byleth just shakes her head and mumbles some excuse of stress and overtraining, to which Claude nods, the grin never leaving his face but his eyes darkening ever so slightly, subtly reminding her that he doesn’t have a shred of trust in her, and Byleth admits that she cannot really blame him._

She’s barely conscious of the decision when she makes it. It’s happened once before, when she’d stood by as Monica-turned-Kronya drove that wretched blade into her father’s back. She barely even had a moment to blink before her heart lurched, as it does now, and she throws herself into the nauseating vortex of time.

She’s done this before—traversed this terrifying, spiraling loop of things she still could not comprehend. She’s done it quite often, in fact. Because while Seteth was trying his best to prop their lives back up on shaky stilts and Flayn was trying to become that _person_ she’d always spoken of becoming, Byleth was lying in her bed, as still as death, and retracing her steps, back, back, back, looking for some way or out or loophole she had forgotten or missed or anything _, anything_ , to change the path that her destiny has carved out for her.

But as Byleth soon discovered, thumbing through the chapters of her life in mind-numbing dashes of memories and echoes of experiences that came and went, there is a beginning to this book she’s been written into.

No matter how far back she goes, she cannot get off this twisted road she’s been forced to travel upon. Each and every time she rewinds the hands of time, she winds and winds and winds until reaches The Beginning. The ghost of Sothis’s frown, an empty chair in a dimly-lit tomb, and that fateful day during the Great Tree Moon, Imperial Year 1180.

No matter how many times she finds herself in that tavern bed, with Jeralt snoring behind her and the faintest crack of dawn spilling through a dusty windowpane, she cannot go further.

She cannot go back far enough to dismantle a country being built upon a tightly-woven web of lies. She cannot alert a king of his own assassination and cover his son’s eyes as his family is torn apart in front of him. She cannot reach a time when she could’ve stolen a sweet and innocent, brown-haired little girl from her throne and kept her safe from the darkness that torments her so. And she cannot see that moment in history where mortals playing gods drip poison into the cup of a prince whose skin is too dark but his eyes too light to exist on a map divided by borders of hatred and prejudice.

She cannot stop her students from ultimately turning their fears inward and murdering each other in the name of houses and Crests and faith.

She cannot prevent a war.

This spiderweb continues to tangle itself into a strangled knot, even long after its weaver is gone. The beginning, much like its counterpart, has an end.

 _But that is not the beginning_ , she tries to plead with... with whom? It must be fate, but fate never gave her this strange, otherworldly mechanism to _mess_ with it—no, fate would never allow it, for it was Sothis who dared to challenge fate in the first place.

And now, it is her turn.

For what is the purpose of a gift if it’s never used?

The dawn of this beginning grows brighter still.

A thousand years is a long time to wait.

Byleth sucks in a breath, and lets go.

☽ ☾ ☽ ☾ ☽ ☾

It’s dark.

“Hey, time to wake up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I also have a Twitter now: @maia__ronan (that's two underscores). I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy out there!


End file.
